With greater access to Information Technology (IT), enterprises have increased capacity and desire to produce and use reports to view useful data. Reports are used in a lot of different fields, such as business, marketing, human resources, education, and others. Reports contain information retrieved from (i.e., in response to computer executable instructions) a data source (e.g., a database, a data warehouse, and the like), where the information is typically structured in accordance with a report schema that specifies the form in which the information may be presented. Reports are usually built by inserting report data items and other formulas into a containment hierarchy of report elements, each structured in graphical zones that are arranged with respect to axes. Any value displayed in a report, or report value, belongs to a specific instance of a zone in a terminal reporting element, and is thus obtained by computing a formula in a dimensional context determined by one of the many combinations of values for each of the axes that govern this zone. Filters may also be assigned to the reporting elements.
There are various software systems and tools that provide techniques for analysis and presentation of information, as well as storing and managing of reports and analytics. Business Intelligence (BI) is a term used to describe a category of systems and applications used to gather, store, provide access to, and analyze data to help enterprise users make better business decisions. Applications that exemplify BI include querying and reporting, online analytical processing (OLAP), profiling, statistical analysis, and forecasting. Examples of applications that allow creation of human-readable reports are BI solutions, such as SAP® Crystal Reports®. There are however a lot of other publically available products that may offer different functionality for preparing the design, visualization, and delivery of reports in various formats. Enterprises may use many different reporting tools with various schemas. However, migrating data from one reporting tool to another imposes a significant burden on IT resources.